The Enforcement in Remote Locations Project (ERLP) is gathering data and information to help guide Measurement Canada enforcement activities at establishments located in remote areas with limited or no ASP service. The ERLP team sent out a consultation survey to 7870 establishments based on specific requirements of 1) located in rural postal codes, 2) have contact information derived from MC’s inspection database and 3) are operators of devices with mandatory inspection frequencies. The consultation period was from July 15 to August 7, 2020 via Google Forms.
Below you will find 4 maps showing the target audience for the survey, who received copies of the survey, who responded to the survey, and the response rate.
Every postal code in Canada is made up of 6 characters. The first 3 of these make up what is known as the Forward Sorting Areas (FSA). For example, a postal code of K1A 0C9 has an FSA of K1A. Canada is broken down into 1620 of these FSAs.
Canada Post identifies ‘urban’ vs ‘rural’ FSAs using the 2nd character of the FSA. Rural FSAs have this second character as a ‘0’ whereas urban FSAs have non-zero numbers. K1A would thus be an “urban” area whereas K0A would be a “rural” area according to Canada Post.
Using this as a starting point, the ERLP team included all rural FSAs as part of our target population. In addition to these, the ERLP team added 43 additional FSAs that, while not ‘rural’ by Canada Post standards, certainly meet our common definition of rural. An example of this is Whitehorse in the Yukon territory. The FSA for Whitehorse is Y1A (i.e. urban) but our ERLP team included this (as one of the additional 43 FSAs) in our target population.
Using Notify (https://notification.alpha.canada.ca/), a tool created by the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), we e-mailed 7870 device owners using establishment data in our inspection database. This map shows us the distributions of establishment owners we targeted in the survey.
Similar to the “mailed” map, this map shows us the distribution of who responded to our survey.
Finally, this map gives us an idea of the distrubtion of response rates (percentage of responses/mailed).